On Sun, 4 Dec 2022, Neal Gompa wrote:
On Sun, Dec 4, 2022 at 11:53 AM Larry Len Rainey
wrote: Microsoft has already spoken on v3, that is why Windows 11 requires Gen 8 I3, i5 and i7 and newer.
(I think they get a kickback on new PC and Laptop sales for the requirement).
The push for raising the x86_64 baseline for RHEL and SLE came from the CPU vendors.
That's not factually correct (for SUSE at least). The Toolchain team brings the opportunity to raise the architecture level to the table when a new codestream (SLE12, SLE15, now ALP) is developed. For SLE15 there was pushback from the CPU vendors because esp. Intel liked to differentiate products with ISA features. For ALP they were both indifferent, aka saw no reason to not raise to -v3 (which is what the Toolchain team proposed for ALP). There has been by no means any push from the CPU vendors to do this, that's just spreading FUD.
That's what triggered the creation of the x86_64 subarch variants (-v1, -v2, -v3). From discussions I've had with people familiar with the matter, they have been pressuring their commercial Linux vendor partners to raise the baseline for a few years now. Ultimately Red Hat compromised[1] and went with x86_64-v2 and while SUSE initially was going to go -v3, I pushed back pretty hard on this and helped make the compromise for -v2 happen for ALP as well.
Intel at some point lobbied to go for AVX-512 but do so by providing
packages built for that in addition to the default ones.
Richard.
--
Richard Biener